Thursday 30 April 2009

Plastic Fantastic

One of the things about towing kids around the world with you - let's not talk right now about pain, blood, shit, tears, broken souls - is the wondrous places they can take you to. Places you would avoid like the plague if you could only choose for yourself what type of experience to have and need not consider the fragile developing mind sets and world views of three bolshy kids with an unhealthy interest in pink cuddly toys and fish.

Places like Ocean Park.

Ocean Park is Hong Kong's version of Disneyworld. It is the place where all the molten bits of glowing Chinese plastic, all the singing, dancing, moving junk of hideous toys are brought together, heaped up, and dumped in a pile on a hillside like someone screaming an almighty blasphemy against anything living and natural.


Strangely - and there is no accounting for this - it is also the place where Hong Kong worships its pandas, alligators, sealions, cute furry animals with big eyes, thousands of variety of goldfish, and the dolphins, who have their very own theatrical showtime. No-one eats them. And that is good.



This amusement/marine theme park is one place I would never normally go within 500 miles of, except of course there are Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to attend to, and they pull me into this place like there is a magnetic attachment involved, the mechanism for which I have yet to discover.

Then once you are inside you have to think to yourself, if you have kids, that it is the most wonderful thing to see your little kidlet faces light up with delight. Perhaps with the expectation of being plunged into a waterfall while strapped into a plastic raft, or with the excitement of seeing a panda, and of watching a dolphin ping a ball with its nose. Really, it should be a mark of your parental devotion if you can tolerate being lifted miles up into the air on the world's second largest outdoor escalator, all in the name of amusement. I should have medals. I certainly have scars.


OK, I admit. I did sort of fall in love with the alligator.

1 comment:

Mutter said...

Hey, where do they keep the alligator? We live opposite the place and I've never once seen the alligator.....